Kondo Polarons in a One-Dimensional Fermi Gas

Abstract

We consider the motion of a spin-1/2 impurity in a one-dimensional gas of spin-1/2 fermions. For antiferromagnetic interaction between the impurity and the fermions, the low temperature behavior of the system is governed by the two-channel Kondo effect, leading to the impurity becoming completely opaque to the spin excitations of the gas. As well as the known spectral signatures of the two-channel Kondo effect, we find that the low temperature mobility of the resulting "Kondo polaron" takes the universal form mu-->3variant Planck's over vF2/2pikB2T2, in sharp contrast to the spinless case where mu proportional variant T(-4).